Why Do Flag Emoji Count As Two Characters?

2014-06-23

[public] 1.07M views, 37.7K likes, 205 dislikes audio only

http://tomscott.com - http://twitter.com/tomscott - If you've tried to tweet a national flag emoji lately -- I can't imagine why -- you'll have noticed that you can only fit 70 of them into a tweet. The reason why is buried in a bit of technical specification, and shows how your phone can lie to you...

Links for mobile users:

Why you can tweet more in Japanese: what counts as a character? /youtube/video/qOcxwRc2Epg

And, until the Computerphile video proper's uploaded, my old treatise on UTF-8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4